The Transition

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by Luke Kennard


  ‘That wasn’t why I mentioned it,’ said Karl. ‘Ugh. If there are ten people in a race, ninety per cent of them don’t win. You only ever make a profit because someone else is making a loss—’

  ‘Let’s run with the sporting analogy,’ said Stu. ‘If you watch a tennis match, a long one with lots of deuces, back and forth, back and forth, there comes a point where the players are exhausted and you can see, even on the TV screen, that one of them wants it more. That’s what it comes down to.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Karl. ‘Well, I’m sitting down and playing with my shoe while the ball bounces past me. I’m questioning the very purpose of tennis.’

  ‘Right, well, we’ve been more than generous,’ said Janna. ‘Let’s get you and Genevieve out of here, shall we? Sooner it’s done the sooner we can bring in your replacements.’

  ‘Janna,’ said Stu.

  ‘Do you remember the couple who absconded, Karl? Of course you do – you’ve been digging for dirt ever since you arrived. Ed and Jess Anderton. Well, they came back and we’ve been asked if we’d take over their mentorship. And we said not until we’d spoken to you. In spite of everything you’ve done we’re still held in fairly high esteem.’

  ‘Let’s keep it civil,’ said Stu. He handed Karl a white square of card with a handwritten note.

  ‘The address,’ he said. ‘The hospital where Genevieve’s staying.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  FIVEACRES. A ‘sanatorium’, Karl thought. He turned it over. It was his Polaroid of Genevieve, sleeping. His heart beat fast as he tucked it into his inside pocket.

  ‘We’ll get the paperwork,’ said Janna, springing to her feet. ‘Stu?’

  They left him on his own. Karl looked around the room. The thick grey impasto of the seascapes, the coffee cups with drips of coffee painted on. Wedged between the speaker and the wall he saw the thick spine of the weathered Mentor’s Edition and, without thinking, pulled it out and slipped it into his bag.

  KARL BOUGHT A bacon sandwich and a mug of tea from a grim little cafe and sat at a plastic table. He thumbed the Mentor’s Edition, then opened it at random and read, the way his mother used to do with the Bible.

  182

  A man lived at the top of a hill in a town that suffered frequent floods. Because he lived at the top of a hill, his house was never damaged when the river burst its banks. He watched from his attic window as human chains passed sandbags; as men waded through the stagnant water to rescue those too stubborn to abandon their homes; as family cars submerged until their roofs looked like keys on a laptop. What could he, a small and timid man, do to help that wasn’t already being done better by others? Surely nobody seriously expected him to open the doors of his tiny cottage and take in the needy? And yet the uncomplicated solidarity he observed from his outpost confirmed something he had suspected all his life. Even as a child he felt that those around him were party to some secret tranche of hopes and fears he neither shared nor felt any curiosity about. Music, art and sports did not engage his attention: he had no natural proficiency and no real desire to address what seemed, to him, relevant only to those who did. He achieved B and C grades in his academic studies with little effort or curiosity about the Magna Carta, the GDP of Brazil, relative formula mass. Sometimes, after school, he would be dropped at the houses of his contemporaries and they would play computer games or watch television while their parents made supper. But one day nationalistic slogans were daubed on the side of the school sports hall. While few had strong feelings either way about what had been written, the entire student population was in trouble. Because nobody would come forward everyone had to sit in complete silence in the assembly room for an hour and a half after school each day for the rest of the term; a state of affairs which would cease only when the perpetrator made themselves known, or when someone with information leading to their identification spoke up. He had no idea who was responsible and resolved to take the group’s punishment with the sense of complete detachment he felt for most other activities. But to his surprise, during those ninety-minute vigils, supervised and shushed by a rota of staff who resented the encroachment on their working day as much as the student body on their free time, he felt at peace. It seemed right and fitting to him that he should, in some small way, be made to suffer, that everybody should, and he with them; that in the interminable wait for someone to come forward and admit to the crime, there was justice, there was dignity, there was meaning.

  Karl slipped the worn paperback into a Jiffy bag and went through his pockets for a scrap of paper. He had to ask at the counter to borrow a pen. He wrote his email address and then he wrote Dear Mr Roderick, I’m sorry things didn’t work out as we’d planned. I hope that you don’t give up and that – he paused and chewed the end of the pen, then remembered he’d borrowed it from the counter – the collapse of the system will prove inevitable. If I can help please get in touch. In the meantime, I wonder if the enclosed might be of interest to you. Make of it what you will. Karl.

  He paused before sliding the note between the pages of the book and added an ‘x’ after his name, just to annoy Mr Roderick.

  49

  FIVEACRES WAS AN oddly shaped building – it looked like a pile of children’s building bricks – with a distorted set of manor-house gates and a long driveway. At its door a green plaque commemorated the ward being opened by a Sir. Beneath this a smaller black metal panel was embossed with the legend BURSARY FOR INNOVATION IN FACILITY DESIGN, followed by a familiar little circled T. Karl gritted his teeth. He was buzzed in and an orderly showed him through three sets of double doors, the locks of which automatically shot open as they approached. Karl swallowed.

  ‘My, my partner,’ he said. ‘Genevieve. I’m here to see her.’

  The assistant nurse beamed. They were expecting him. She showed him around the locked ward. It was a large semicircle with communal areas and twelve individual rooms with glass doors.

  ‘You can stand anywhere in the semicircle and see into every bedroom.’

  ‘The Panopticon,’ said Karl.

  ‘Makes observations easier. Less invasive.’

  A teenage boy sat at a table with a partially completed jigsaw puzzle of Magritte’s Le Fils de l’homme. A woman with bandages on her forearms sat opposite him, her mouth open.

  ‘Do you ever have anyone come in to read or anything?’ said Karl. ‘Like a volunteer? Or a poetry group or something?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the nurse. ‘We try to keep excitement to a minimum.’

  ‘It could be, like, a boring poetry group?’

  ‘I’ll talk to the doctor.’

  ‘If there’s something I can do,’ said Karl.

  He stroked her hair.

  ‘This’ll pass,’ he said.

  ‘Where? Thistle Pass?’

  ‘It will.’

  ‘What?’

  Genevieve lay across his lap. She was wrapped in a cellular blanket. A male nurse kept walking in and out of the area. He pretended to adjust the window.

  ‘You can take her for a walk if you like.’

  The hospital stood near the airport and had a little yard which overlooked a disused landing strip. Karl and Genevieve were in the centre parting between the sun lounge and the fence of the distant second runway.

  ‘The apple-thick quadrant,’ said Genevieve.

  ‘The what? Don’t go all avant-garde on me.’

  ‘It’s just words.’

  ‘What have they done to you?’ said Karl. ‘I love you. I’m so sorry. I love you.’

  Genevieve said that she was fine. At first Janna and Stu had told her she didn’t need anything, that Karl was keeping her pacified because he couldn’t cope with her creative energy, that if she could really commit to an alternative treatment like Calibration she’d be a new woman within a matter of months. Then there was a bad misunderstanding with a visiting group from America or somewhere and she wasn’t entirely sure what had happened. Now they were trying some new pills. She said it
was like playing a carpeted piano. Maybe if you hit the keys hard enough there was a faint sense of which note had been struck, but really it was just going through the motions.

  She smiled sadly. She said, ‘Have I told you about how Dad used to take us to the airport? He’d make a flask of hot chocolate and we’d buy croissants with jam from the cafe. Then we’d just stand in the wind and eat cold croissants and watch the planes take off.’

  She took Karl’s hand and said it was kind of him to visit. He instinctively squeezed her hand and drew her towards him, putting an arm around her. He thought of images of amoebas bonding. Overhead a plane the size of a toy climbed higher with a roar that sounded like victory or agony.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘Tell me about yourself.’

  Acknowledgements

  I am indebted to Anna Kelly and Lottie Fyfe at 4th Estate. To Georgia Garrett, Matthew Turner and Emma Paterson at RCW. Your advice and attention to detail is greater than I’m worthy of. To those who read and discussed early drafts with me, especially Abi Curtis, Richard House and Luke Brown. To my former professors at the University of Exeter, Andy Brown and Philip Hensher. Also to my English teachers at secondary school, Paul Coffman and Clare Morris, who used to read my short stories – outside of their innumerable official duties – expecting nothing in return other than some later emulation of their generosity which I can only try to live up to. Thank you.

  About the Author

  Luke Kennard has published five collections of poetry. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2005 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2007. In 2014 he was selected by the Poetry Book Society as one of the Next Generation Poets. His latest poetry collection, Cain, was published by Penned in the Margins in June 2016. He lectures at the University of Birmingham. The Transition is his first novel.

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

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  Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  http://www.harpercollins.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

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  HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited

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  http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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  London, SE1 9GF, UK

  http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

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  New York, NY 10007

  http://www.harpercollins.com

 

 

 


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